True Love: Tinder For Fairy Tales
by Meresger
Summary: Satirical prologue to an upcoming story "Heroes are Stupid, Villains are Attractive". The subsequent full story is Swanfire, so I have categorized this as such, though no characters are named here. This is meant to be a funny set-up for what's gone wrong with life and love in Storybrooke. It may feature verbatem into the story as a prop/plot device. (Rating is for mature language)
1. Chapter 1

Title: True Love: Tinder For Fairy Tales

Disclaimer: I don't own _Once Upon A Time_. If I did, Adam  & Eddy would be fired and picking up litter by the side of the highway.

Summary: Satirical prologue to an upcoming story "Heroes are Stupid, Villains are Attractive".

Author's Note: I wanted chapter numbers to line up with my upcoming story (it's a pet peeve of mine when reading fanfiction), and its blatant parody doesn't quite fit in, with the body of the story, so I'm posting this separately as something of a disclaimer.

Warning: This disclaimer contains mentions of the existence of sex and the "f" word. I can't help it. I'm just crass like that.

* * *

 **True Love: Tinder For Fairy Tales**

Met someone with a sketchy tattoo and a skewed sense of honor whose wife you murdered?

Sell yourself into indentured servitude for that sense of freedom and adventure you couldn't get in an arranged marriage?

Pull an alcoholic revenge-killer out from under the pile of people he helped kill in order to infiltrate your heroic girl gang so he could help your son's maternal grandmother murder his paternal grandfather?

Dance at a ball with a girl whose family history of magical Narcolepsy got you turned into a fire-breathing monster and hunted by blood-thirsty soldiers of fortune in a foreign land for so long that you learned their extremely complex written language despite being surrounded by illiterate peasants?

Got robbed and concussed by a wanted traitor on the way to your wedding which resulted in your mother's murder, a two front war, the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of peasants, and the abandonment of your newborn daughter to a life of hardship, neglect, abuse, and a destiny to save everyone by becoming the host for a millennia-old immortal demon?

It's True Love!

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 _True Love is a trademark of the Walt Disney Corporation, and any use without the express written consent of The House of Mouse, is prohibited._

 _Do not attempt to engage in True Love if you are bellow a 9 on the hotness scale, if you are homosexual, or if you are over the age of "I could pass for eighteen in the right lighting"._

 _Finding True Love may cause repeated bouts of amnesia; anthropomorphic transformation; magical identity theft; unscheduled portal travel; personality disorders including loss of established inherent character traits, presentation of contrary behavior, and narcissism; as well as intermittent long and short term memory loss; increased libido and promiscuity; a belief that happiness is defined by marriage and procreation; the deaths of all other eligible members of the opposite sex who are into you; and a beer-goggle-like delusion that the British accent makes a person smarter, their love more profound, and fucking them a good idea in spite of a history of infidelity, rape and/or homicidal acts._

 _True Love may also result in an increased frequency of all kinds of nonsensical magical bullshit whenever you attempt to say more than "I love you, let's fuck"._

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True Love isn't about getting to know the person you're going to spend your life with, it's about endlessly battling tropes, cliches, and MacGuffins in between _deus ex machina_ and wandering plot holes. So, get _your_ True Love with the person you just met who probably tried to kill you or murdered a member of your family today!


	2. Chapter 2

_Once upon a time_ , three centuries ago... or was it two centuries...?

Eh, fuck it!

Let's just forget all that Enchanted Forest exposition crap.

Here's what you need to know:

It's been between a year and three years (depending on how portal-travel causes puberty to accelerate) since Emma used the dagger to attract the spawn of the Smoke Monster and that demony thing that made the First Slayer and became the Dark Swan... er Dark One.

What happened after that? Well, a lot of shit I imagine that we'll be made up as this story goes along.

Storybrooke was going through an unprecedented peaceful period of more than a month during which...

An un-Dark-One'd Emma, recently married to her swashbuckling leather-clad accessory, was enjoying the breather by spending her days with grilled cheese, pirate booty, and somewhat less enthusiastically with an increasing pile of second-hand baby magazines delivered to her doorstep by a stork named Snow White and the piles of paperwork that Sheriff Nolan always found baby-related reasons not to finish. But she had her Tallahassee, even if her parents were annoying.

Hook had regained his not-really-acursed hand so he could properly squeeze Emma's princess booty whenever he liked, which was often, and enhance his cheating skills at his secret weekly card, dice, and occasional cock-fighting "Boys Night Out" game to which he looked forward every Night Patrol, even if he had to put up with his step-son cramping his style. The freakishly tall brat had his grandfather's blackmailing skills. But the princess booty was worth pretending he liked any of the people he associated with the rest of the week.

Henry, having grudgingly accepted his step-father's existence mostly to make use of the illegal gambling to supplement his allowance, and partly just because it was amusing to blackmail the pirate, and putting up with his other mother's domestic bliss with his more than wanting childhood hero, was focusing on getting his driver's license so he didn't have to clandestinely hotwire cars to get his Furious groove on without Grandpa Charming cramping his style. And trying to find ways to avoid his grandmother's attempts to set him up on horribly embarrassing 1950's-themed dates and "accidentally" spill pixie dust in his general direction to find his soulmate so she could foist on him the bridal magazines that Emma hadn't burned in her attempt to avoid _Attack of the Wedding Planning Momzilla_... before an actual monster attacked the actual wedding. Which Henry certainly had nothing to do with! *cough cough*

Still living in the loft, The Charmings had welcomed a second child into their entirely-unsafe-for-young-children home and were settling happily into boring normality like a second skin in between Mary Margaret pretending that she knew anything about teaching junior high science class and David polishing the gun he had neither the permit nor training nor officially appointed badge to use. But who cares? Snow White and Prince Charming can do whatever they want!

Belle and Rumplestitlskin had recently, and somewhat grudgingly, returned from a round-the-world trip undertaken to get over their bitterness at their serial mistreatment by their own friends and family with lots of sun, shopping, and alcohol, lest they attempt to start a family and inflict their aggravation on an innocent child. Belle had dusted off her books, dismayed that Killian had failed to keep his promise to run the Library in her absence, but set to the task of opening a computer lab while downing Folic Acid and Red Clover like candy. Mr. Gold was back at the pawn shop, dusting off his wares that he hadn't expected anyone to mind since the only reason people ever came in was for magical-mayhem-related business and he didn't trust the do-gooders to let themselves in to pick and choose which doohickie was best for their latest self-made apolcalypse.

Last, but certainly not least, Regina and Robin had wed, the former Evil Queen adopting Roland and working to keep the secret town of Storybrooke functioning with its mysterious midnight supply train and self-contained power plant while Robin had taken over ownership of The Rabbit Hole after its cursed owner decided to take over Any Given Sundae following one too many altercations with Keith of Nottingham. Regina was finally a hero... or at least not a villain anymore in the eyes of the town she'd now been elected to run - probably because Belle was out of town and Mary Margaret's brief tenure resulted in rolling blackouts and people getting attacked by birds thanks to her "birdhouse on every corner" idea. But still, it totally counted! And thanks to Emma's brief tenure as a homicidal demon host, she was living a Zelena-free existence...

Up until the morning that Nurse Ratched was doing her rounds and nearly had a heart-attack to find the red-headed psychopath lounging in her cell.

It was on that day, that Storybrooke's dead started to come back...


End file.
